“You can be a spectator,” Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh told students and faculty during a March 2015 speech at Catholic University of America Columbus School of Law. “You can watch the game from the sidelines, but you’re not participating in [the] political world.”

That speech, entitled “The Judge As Umpire," is a take from Kavanaugh on Chief Justice John Roberts’s famous “Judges are like umpires” quote from his own Senate confirmation hearings in 2005.

Despite the willingness of both men to employ sports metaphors, the Supreme Court is no game. Its nine justices decide the country’s most important legal questions and can shape policy — and lives — for decades. Following a reality-TV-esque buildup, Trump announced his SCOTUS pick on the evening of Monday, July 9, a judge who, far from sitting on the sidelines, has built an extensive and robust legal career in which he's made significant decisions about important issues like reproductive rights and affordable health care.

“Brett Cavanaugh is a true Second Amendment radical,” Murphy wrote. “He believes assault weapon bans are unconstitutional, a position way out of the judicial mainstream, even far to the right of the late Justice Scalia.”

The Los Angeles Timesreported that, in 2011, while on the US. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, Kavanaugh filed a 52-page dissenting opinion from his colleagues, two other Republican appointees who voted 2-1 to uphold an ordinance banning semiautomatic rifles and high-capacity magazines.

“Our task is to apply the Constitution and the precedents of the Supreme Court regardless of whether the result is one we agree with as a matter of...principles or policy,” Kavanaugh wrote in his dissent.

He thinks the government has an interest in “favoring fetal life.”

“The government has...interest in favoring fetal life...and refraining from facilitating abortion,” Kavanaugh wrote in a 2017 dissent after the D.C circuit ordered the release of a teenage girl from an immigration detention facility so she would be able to terminate her pregnancy. The words are a stark reminder of what’s at stake for millions of women under a Supreme Court with Kavanaugh, particularly women with the least access to health care and fewest economic resources. But there’s perhaps no bigger prize for Trump and the GOP than women’s reproductive, economic, and social freedoms.

“We already know how Brett Kavanaugh would rule on Roe v. Wade, because the president told us so,” Dawn Laguens, executive vice president of Planned Parenthood, said in a statement. Shortly after the 2016 election, Trump stated he would appoint “pro-life” judges to the bench and send the issue of abortion back to the states, a position he has reiterated in recent weeks.

“We take Trump at his word that Brett Kavanaugh would overturn Roe v. Wade and get rid of the Affordable Care Act,” Laguens continued.

In a 2011 dissent on a ruling upholding the ACA’s constitutionality, Kavanaugh argued that the president could decline to uphold legislation like the ACA despite a court’s findings, according to The Washington Post. As recently as 2015, Kavanaugh argued that the Affordable Care Act’s free contraception coverage imposes on religious freedom.

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NARAL president Ilyse Hogue said in a statement, “This is a battle for the very heart and soul of our country, and the result is about nothing less than whether women will be second-class citizens for generations to come.”

All three, like Kavanaugh, are proponents of a school of constitutional thought called originalism, which argues that the Constitution should be interpreted exactly as its words were understood at the time they were written over 230 years ago. Considering just how much the world has changed since 1787, that outlook excludes some vitally important groups, like everyone who is not a Christian heterosexual cis white male.

“Kavanaugh is an ideologically driven pick designed to create an activist Supreme Court that will undermine rights and protections for women, LGBTQ people, immigrants and all vulnerable people,” GLAAD president and CEO Sarah Kate Ellis wrote in a statement. “Americans do not want or need 40 more years of Trump’s values.”

The Family Research Council (which has been designated as an anti-LGBTQ+ hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center) and the Heritage Foundation (which has spoken out against policies like marriage equality, protections for LGBTQ+ people, and abortion access) have both praised Kavanaugh, the latter calling him a “stellar” judge and a “thoughtful jurist.”

He’s said presidents shouldn't have to deal with "civil suits, criminal investigations, or criminal prosecutions" while in office.

Along with his conservative credentials, Kavanaugh has deep ties to Washington and the White House. He helped investigate President Bill Clinton’s Monica Lewinsky scandal as part of Kenneth Starr’s team of lawyers during the 1990s and was a staff lawyer for President George W. Bush after that. In a 2009 Minnesota Law Review article, Kavanaugh argued that sitting presidents should, essentially, be above the law while in office.

“I believe that the President should be excused from some of the burdens of ordinary citizenship while serving in office,” Kavanaugh argued. “We should not burden a sitting President with civil suits, criminal investigations, or criminal prosecutions.” He added that any “indictment and trial of a sitting President” would “cripple the federal government.”

“Having seen first hand how complex and difficult the job is,” Kavanaugh wrote in his 2009 article, “I believe it vital that the President be able to focus on his never-ending tasks with as few distractions as possible.”